INTERVIEWS & SPOTLIGHTS: DAISY FRIED

Daisy Fried’s book of “versions and aversions” of the 19th C. French poet, Charles Baudelaire, will be published by Flood Editions in 2022. She is also the author of three other books of poems: My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. A past Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellow in poetry, she is a member of the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for writers, and at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she lives.

I Have Not Forgotten

i.m. Jim Quinn (1935–2020)

I have not forgotten, neighbor,

our red brick rowhouse, tiny and quiet

with the window always cracked open

even in winter, and us rolling together

into the middle of the dented mattress,

a rooster in someone’s courtyard crowing

in the gray, lording it over his harem

of illegal chickens; where like gods

we couldn’t stop being naked;

those evenings the sun, superbly streaming,

broke its sheaf of colors on the glass,

seemed a giant inquisitive eye

watching our long quiet suppers,

its reflections spritzing like candlelight

on the frugal tablecloth

and on the strewn pages of your manuscripts.

—after Baudelaire’s “Je n’ai pas oublié”

First published in The Paris Review